One of our forthcoming publications will include the story ‘The Superfluous Man’ and we’re keen to hear from any member who has information or knowledge about it. We’re particularly interested in finding out more about the context.

What we know: In 1850 Turgenev published The Diary of a Superfluous Man and the concept took hold, being applied to other characters in Russian novels (including earlier works) In 1885 an article in The Star includes a reference as follows: 'An invitation comes for a drawing-room meeting, at which Miss Circe Robinson will deliver a lecture on "Superfluous Man." The voice that once uttered soft nothings on the back staircase at Lady Crushington's now shrieks itself hoarse over the wrongs of woman. The eyes whose starry gleam made her admirers even greater fools than they looked are now hidden by big spectacles. When next again you meet, Circe is walking in an outdoor procession at the head of her shriek- sisterhood, and staggering under the weight of a banner inscribed with the strange device " Down with Man !" '

Barrie’s own 1889 story was serialised in The Young Man magazine.

In 1894 a novel A Superfluous Woman was published by Emma Francis Brooks.

Do you know something more? If you can give us any critical comment or context please comment below or email us jmbarriesociety@gmail.com

SCENE.- The Library of a Piccadilly club for high thinking and bad dinners. Time midnight. Four eminent novelists of the day regarding each other self-consciously They are (1) a Realist,(2) a Romancist , (3) an Elsmerian, (4) a Stylist. The clock strikes thirteen, and they all start...

In this short play dating from 1890, Barrie takes a humorous look at a number of literary styles. We’d welcome your opeenions about who each of the ‘novelists’ might represent – as well as whether in one sense they represent different parts of Barrie’s own character.

Suggestions are that the Elsmerian is to do with the bestselling novel Robert Elsmere by Mrs Humphrey Ward. We'd welcome your thoughts on this, as well as who the Realist, Romancist and Stylist are. Please add your comments below...

Welcome to M'Connachie's. (Some might even say the new, improved version!) If you look at the categories tab on the right you'll see the various texts, and topics that are open for 'talking' about. click on the category to follow the chat - of course it starts at the bottom and works its way up, rather than the standard top down method... but that's all part of the fun, right?We look forward to your comments, and, if you feel like starting a topic of your own, just email us and we'll get it set up. In the meantime, here are the few wee rules to abide by:

The first rule of M’Connachie’s Talking Text ShopIt is not a fight club.The second rule of M’Connachie’s Talking Text ShopAll opinions are strictly that – opeenions – and should be both treated and respected as such. Everyone has at least one and everyone is entitled to one.The third rule of M’Connachie’s Talking Text ShopIt is encouraged that you read the book you are talking about before you talk about it.

For more details on how to submit click HERE

For those who live in the world of prose rather than fancy and who like things to be clearer than mud – M’Connachie’s Talking Shop is are a series of blog posts – ‘talking points’ about an aspect of the text – which encourage debate and commentary from all members.

These are public forums for discussion and we expect everyone, however passionate, to remain polite at all times.​

Captain Hook is described as having a copy of Roget's Thesaurus which was one of Barrie's favourite books. I think this is the only mention of a book in Peter Pan. In The Admirable Crichton, Crichton is the only person on the island with a book - a collection of W E Henley's poems – Henley of course being a good friend (and whose daughter ‘invented’ the name Wendy). As a non-aristocrat, who is more competent than the rest of the party and who is particularly careful about 'playing the game', Crichton might be seen as one of the personifications of Barrie.A developing theory is that books might serve as ‘badges’ for Barrie saying ‘this is me’ in his fiction/drama.What other books are mentioned in Barrie’s work that might serve as being a ‘badge’ for ‘this is me’? And what do others think of this as a theory? Feel free to add your comment below:

​Andrew Nash, ‘Better Dead’. J.M.Barrie’s First Book and the Shilling Fiction Market.This article was published in the Scottish Literary Review Volume 7, Number 1, Spring/Summer 2015 pp. 19-41

The abstract is free to view here https://muse.jhu.edu/article/582218/pdf but beyond that, if you don’t have academic ‘privileges’ it’s a bit trickier. If you are a member of the National Library of Scotland (and if you are in Scotland I would heartily recommend it) you can gain access to the EBSCO Host through Humanities International Complete database*

Not wanting to infringe copyright, I haven’t put the abstract up here, but if you can’t read it online then I’d be happy to email it to members. What follows is my ‘opeenion’ about the article.

In essence, as I read it, Nash’s argument is that the form and content are connected in a vital way – in Better Dead as a ‘shilling’ novel we are getting something appropriate to the form and should not try to dress the work up as anything else. This is eminently sensible – and the insight Nash offers into the history of publishing at this most interesting of times – the role of journalism in the rise of mass market publishing and the creation of the celebrity authors of the late 19th century is worth the article alone. He notes ‘The emergence of the form was facilitated by the growth of new retails outlets for fiction, particularly the spread of railway bookstalls. In fiction publishing of this period the retail price of a book often indicated its consumer outlet.’

Nash also raises some points which have interest as regards the contemporary modes of publication, and which resonate and have relevance with issues in today’s flexible publishing market-place. I found his exploration and explanation of the half-profit system or the ‘‘commission and divide’ system, as it was termed in the trade,’ helpful in drawing connections between publishing business models from the 19th century and present models, and the connections between mass market publishing at the end of the 19th century and the rise of digital publishing in the early 21st century are worthwhile exploring whether you are interested in Barrie or not.

Beyond that, as might be expected, Nash offers a critique of Better Dead. Having situated it in its temporal and publishing context, he also sites it generically – as a work of political satire. Through example Nash reveals many of the contemporary references and relevances that might otherwise elude us.

The ephemerality of satire, especially of the ‘penny shilling’ or brochure type, should not be underestimated. For me the analogy is medieval painting. There is little point disputing the quality of perspective or representational skill of a work that serves if not primarily, then at least subordinately, as an allegorical work – the allegory lost to those of us without the requisite religious and cultural knowledge. And this is the case with Better Dead. Judging it without a working knowledge of the contemporary issues and ‘characters’ of the political scene leaves the reader with a decidedly incomplete picture from which to ‘judge’ its creative and literary merits.

Nash reveals what contemporary reviewers thought of the work including the Glasgow Herald, whom he says ‘perceptively suggested that Barrie was parodying the form of the shilling novel almost as much as he was parodying contemporary politics.’

This points us towards the centrality of humour in Barrie’s work - without which one will always fail to get a grip of Barrie’s writing. Nash points to Barrie’s comic style, which he notes ‘lies in the way the tone of a sentence or paragraph abruptly shifts with the introduction of a new clause.’

In this article, which like Better Dead itself, repays revisiting time and again, Nash has managed to bring a range of aspects into one place which is a boon for those of us interested in Barrie but without the time, space or skill to research all these aspects and make the connections. It is also significant in contextualising Barrie’s importance in the literary world of his day. But this is not all. I also picked up on a perhaps less obvious aspect to the article which offers food for thought.

Nash’s research draws on unpublished correspondence between Barrie and Swan Sonnenschein, Lowrey & Co as well as his friend Gilmour and others. I am interested in the ‘construction’ of the author in correspondence and Barrie seems a particularly interesting case in point. The return to primary source material in the form of letters is welcome but carries, I think, some dangers for literary criticism.

I would like to thank Dr Andrew Nash for his recent highlighting of his article about Better Dead from 2014. The article has a lot of very interesting things to say, not just about Barrie and Better Dead, but about publishing and cultural production as well. This is one of the things I had hoped for in the talking shops – we may not be able to sit down over a pint or a coffee and ‘chat’ Barrie, but via the written word I have already had something of a ‘conversation,’ and hope for more. I hope others will join in.

Talking shop conversations are perhaps more slow-burn than the instant gratification of social media, but they also have the potential for more depth and perhaps especially offer a depth of perspective which is lacking in the day to day online ‘interactions’ which of necessity replace ‘live’ chat for many of us.

There is perhaps more scope to listen and respond via the keyboard than we have previously considered – we have maybe lost sight of the potential in this world of short form, touchscreen, ‘connected’ living. But the technology is simply the tool and it is for us to adapt it to our own wants and needs. Being able to ‘talk’ via long form – beyond the personal email – is, for me, an important communicative act and in itself an important part of cultural creativity. ​Please feel free to offer your own ‘opeenion’ piece, either as a comment or for long-form in a corner of the talking shop all of its own. ​Cally Phillips

*If you need help in this, please email and I’ll try and talk you through the process. It’s well worth it.

Did you have teachers like those portrayed in J.M.Barrie's An Edinburgh Eleven? I want to throw down a challenge to others. Can you construct your own Eleven? Or even a Seven, or a Five? Whether it be from University or School, can you write a (non libellous) series of sketches about teachers who influenced you? ​If you take up the challenge, then send us your work – we’ll share it around the members of the Lit Soc and pick our favourite to receive a free copy of one of our new Barrie series books. Get reading An Edinburgh Eleven and more importantly get writing your own version.

I am working on my own Eleven, hand-picked from the academics of St Andrews in the 1980s. I'll be updating very soon but I want to hear about the teachers who inspired (or confounded) YOU - and your thoughts on Barrie's 'Eleven' are also welcomed.

Just add your comments below, or if you have longer pieces email jmbarriesociety@gmail.com and we'll upload the piece for you.

This is early Barrie. Self published Barrie. It dates in published form from 1887. It is Barrie before he ‘was’ Barrie, while he was still being published (and more often not published) as Anon or Gavin Ogilvy. He claimed later to be embarrassed by it. But I don’t see anything to be embarrassed by. It stands the test of time. Sure it’s not a complete, polished novel – but Barrie never really went down that route. He was far too experimental to constrain himself fully within the standard ‘forms’ of fiction. Once you understand that you find his writing much more powerful. He doesn’t do straightjackets. And yet he was able to write concise, humorous, popularist fiction which engages as it confuses. And I think we can see the seeds of all this within Better Dead.

​When I think about Better Dead, and it is one of those stories whose images stay with me, I am transported back in time. The images, and more importantly the feeling or ‘tone’ it leaves me with is the same as I get from Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) or John Buchan’s The Thirty Nine Steps (1915) Which for my money places Barrie if not into a ‘genre’ or ‘style’ then at least onto a ‘spectrum’ in the company of some very good writers. I think it also shows him as an ‘innovator.’

Barrie wrote Better Dead in his late twenties. That’s a time in life when one is still hopeful of ‘making it’ (whatever that might be) and one’s view on the world and one’s place in it is quite different from what it is in one’s forties or fifties (and later I expect, I’ve yet to receive the wisdom of that many years). And doubtless the age that you are when you read something impacts on the ‘message’ you get from it. I have certainly found that works I read in my twenties 'read' quite differently with each passing decade. The relationship between writer and reader changes over time - which is one of the things I find fascinating about the process (both as writer and as reader.)

There is definitely something of youth in Better Dead. I think Barrie was wrong in being later embarrassed by it (though I suspect that, being Barrie, he wasn’t that embarrassed, he was the master of sleight of hand in the respect of critical commentary).

I’ve recently come across something similar but completely different. It’s another young, unknown writer struggling with the iniquities of the social order and political system. She’s ‘doing a Barrie’ in a modern context. She’s called Sara Clark and her work in progress is called The Last Day and is being storyboarded on Facebook. How’s that for a contemporary ‘self-publishing’ option?

It’s not derivative of Barrie, but she’s working on the same spectrum, and for me it’s exciting to know that, despite the commercial constraints of the mainstream – which get harder and tighter with every year – and produce more and more homogenised writing that I am less and less interested in reading – there are still the ‘indies’ out there working under the radar.

We need young writers (we need all writers) to be more experimental, to write more from the heart and to express their angst in written form. This is writing to ‘connect’ emotionally to. Writing to make you think as well as laugh. I urge you to read Better Dead. And to seek out The Last Day. Both will challenge your expectations.

Once you've finished reading please come back and talk about your impressions. Talking about fiction gives it another life. And, for me at least, part of the ‘point’ of such writing is that it connects one mind to another. It’s about sharing of thought and emotion – something we have all the technology but few of the ‘tools’ to do these days.

At M’Connachie’s Talking Shop I hope we can step out of the shadows, stop fearing ‘what people think’ or whether we are ‘saying the right things’ in relation to texts. Literary criticism is not the exclusive province of the classroom or academia. It’s for everyone. It's a way we can meaningfully communicate thoughts and feelings.

All opinions are welcomed here – just engage with the debate, help create the debate, talk about what you read and share what you feel. Don’t be embarrassed. Being too frightened to share your opinion simply stifles debate and freedom of speech. You don’t need to know the ‘rules’ to have a go. I suggest we all need to learn how to express ourselves better – but it’s like learning to swim, you have to get into the water to do it. Whether you’re going to dive (or jump) right in the deep end or just dip your toe in the water, please get wet – read Better Dead and tell us what you think about it. ~~~~~How to get your hands, eyes and mind on Better Dead.It’s available as an ebook HERE http://www.unco.scot/store/p130/Better_Dead_.html(members of J.M.Barrie Literary Society can download it for free by using the Members code JUMBLIS at checkout)Or online as a McSerial HEREhttp://www.mcstorytellers.com/bd-chapter-1.htmlnavigate your way back through the home page http://www.mcstorytellers.com/via oor McSerials /Barrie section to get the other episodes. It’s finger clicking good! It is also coming soon in a J.M.Barrie Literary Society paperback edition.

The Last Day (work in progress) is going to be serialised at McStorytellers, commencing on Weds June 28th. If you can't wait, you can follow Sara's progress on her Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/clarkyslass

I hope to hear from you soon, Cally Phillips 19th June 2017.

Please feel free to add your comments below - or if you have a longer piece you want to contribute, send it as a word document by email to jmbarriesociety@gmail.com and we'll upload it for you.

This is our first test Talking Shop. How does it work? First, it's good if you read the text we're going to talk about. You can download it FREEHERE. Then make yourself a cup of tea or coffee. Find a biscuit, or bake a cake. Read, eat, drink and when you've formed an opinion, simply add it to the COMMENTS section at the end of this piece. You can comment on the text, this piece or any of the other comments. If you have so much to say that you feel it's too long for a comments box, (over 500 words) just email us your piece and we'll give it a space of its own in the Talking Shop - where others will then read, drink, eat and give their opinion.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then let's begin...

J.M.Barrie and Literary Societies.​

Before, (or after) you've read 'A Literary Society' which is a sketch from Barrie's 'Auld Licht Idylls' you might like to know that JMB mentions Literary Societies and Clubs (not always flatteringly) in many of his texts. Here are a few examples: In When a Man’s Single in a conversation between Rob and Kirker we discover one:I’m going down to the Frying Pan to see him now.’‘The Frying Pan?’ echoed Rob.‘It’s a literary club,’ Kirker explained, ‘and very exclusive. If you come with me I’ll introduce you.’

Taking ourselves out of the Frying Pan, in Tommy and Grizel a literary club is set up by ‘fans’ in London's fashionable Mayfair. They call themselves The Tommies – and are subject to Barrie’s finest wit:

'There was a Tommy society in Mayfair that winter, nearly all of the members eminent or beautiful, and they held each other’s hands. Both sexes were eligible, married or single, and the one rule was something about sympathy. It afterwards became the Souls, but those in the know still call them the Tommies.They blackballed Mrs. Jerry (she was rather plump), but her married stepdaughter, Lady Pippinworth (who had been a Miss Ridge-Fulton), was one of them. Indeed, the Ridge-Fultons are among the thinnest families in the country.T. Sandys was invited to join the society, but declined, and thus never quite knew what they did, nor can any outsider know, there being a regulation among the Tommies against telling. I believe, however, that they were a brotherhood, with sisters. You had to pass an examination in unrequited love, showing how you had suffered, and after that either the men or the women (I forget which) dressed in white to the throat, and then each got some other’s old love’s hand to hold, and you all sat on the floor and thought hard. There may have been even more in it than this, for one got to know Tommies at sight by a sort of careworn halo round the brow, and it is said that the House of Commons was several times nearly counted out because so many of its middle-aged members were holding the floor in another place.Of course there were also the Anti-Tommies, who called themselves (rather vulgarly) the Tummies. Many of them were that shape. They held that, though you had loved in vain, it was no such mighty matter to boast of; but they were poor in argument, and their only really strong card was that Mr. Sandys was stoutish himself.Their organs in the press said that he was a man of true genius, and slightly inclined toembonpoint.'In the prequel, Sentimental Tommy we learn about Thrums Book Club, frequented by Miss Ailie, the one teacher who ‘sees something’ in Tommy as a boy:

‘Thrums Book Club, of which Miss Ailie was one of the twelve members. Each member contributed a book every year, and as their tastes in literature differed, all sorts of books came into the club, and there was one member who invariably gave a ro-ro-romance. He was double-chinned and forty, but the school-mistress called him the dashing young banker, and for months she avoided his dangerous contribution. But always there came a black day when a desire to read the novel seized her, and she hurried home with it beneath her rokelay. This year the dashing banker’s choice was a lady’s novel called “I Love My Love with an A,” and it was a frivolous tale, those being before the days of the new fiction, with its grand discovery that women have an equal right with men to grow beards. The hero had such a way with him and was so young (Miss Ailie could not stand them a day more than twenty) that the school-mistress was enraptured and scared at every page, but she fondly hoped that Tommy did not understand. However, he discovered one day what something printed thus, “D — n,” meant, and he immediately said the word with such unction that Miss Ailie let fall her knitting. She would have ended the readings then had not Agatha been at that point in the arms of an officer who, Miss Ailie felt almost certain, had a wife in India, and so how could she rest till she knew for certain? To track the officer by herself was not to be thought of, to read without knitting being such shameless waste of time, and it was decided to resume the readings on a revised plan: Tommy to say “stroke” in place of the “D — ns,” and “word we have no concern with” instead of “Darling” and “Little One.”’From these and other references to Literary clubs and matters in his writing, Barrie suggests to us that he sees right through both the aspirational hypocrisy and the sycophancy that associates itself with writers. However, he holds firmly (as does his character Tommy) onto the desire to be a great writer.​But what do you think about his 'A Literary Society'? and what does Barrie’s writing tell you about his relationship to his ‘craft’? Do you have an opinion? Well, why not join M’Connachie’s Talking Shop and tell us what you think. All you have to do is add your comment below! We are ready to hear from you RIGHT NOW.